Sweet Juanita

Rand Anderson’s parents were big country fans. So naturally, he rebelled against the sound at first, and embraced punk and metal. But eventually, he returned to the fold. He even played with the Phoenix outfit Harry Luge and Haywire for 18 months in the mid-2000s. But first, he dove headfirst into synthesizers and drum machines in the ‘80s, when Duran Duran and the Cure were making waves, and gradually grew to embrace all sorts of different musical genres.

It appears that this was at least partially due to his siblings’ scattershot tastes in popular music. “I had all these brothers and sisters, and we would take turns on the record player,” Anderson explains. “So I would have to listen to everything from Cher to Olivia Newton John to Deep Purple, Lynyrd Skynyrd…acid rock. Ultimately, the path I really got onto, I heard it in the Grateful Dead’s music. I term it multi-genre, improvisation rock. It encompasses a feeling of R&B and rock, and sometimes, blues, jazz, and reggae. The Beatles have it in their songwriting too. I think it ultimately came down to that: songwriting, and wanting to be versatile through that. I would take gigs with all sorts of different kinds of bands. Different styles with different bands on different instruments. Go play in a funk band. Go play in a reggae band. I played pedal steel. I just love music in all sorts of different genres.”

Rand Anderson: grateful for the Dead

Anderson’s longest running gig was with the LA jam band Freshly Baked, “Like the cookies,” according to his current Sweet Juanita bandmate John Bennett. Freshly Baked was active from 1993 through 2000. They were briefly signed to House of Blues Records, but the label went under before they could record an album.

They eventually ended up in Flagstaff, Arizona and toured heavily in Colorado. “Keystone, Breckenridge, Telluride, and Durango. Ski town to ski town. Played in all those places and got to snowboard all day,” he says. Anderson landed in San Diego circa 2008, but Bennett says the two didn’t start collaborating until the Covid days. “We used to jam together sometimes, but we really came together during the pandemic when we were both kind of losing our minds a little bit.”

Bennett gave music the full embrace a bit later in his life than Anderson. In his twenties, he lived in Australia for a year and half, where he had a roommate who was an ace musician. They played together enough that, by the time Bennett returned to the U.S., he had the bug and started jamming with other musicians. “I played in a couple of really cool bands, but we never really took it very far,” he says. “It was just more for fun than anything else.”

At its core, Sweet Juanita is Anderson and Bennett. The band’s Bandcamp page describes it as “Americana and sometimes Spacey Hippy Rock,” and that about sums it up. The two often perform as a duo, but can fill out the band for the bigger gigs. They have what they refer to as a stable of musicians upon whom they can call to come out and play. “We have two bass players, maybe three or four other drummers,” Bennett says.

“Depending on the venue, it could be a three-piece or a seven-piece,” adds Anderson. “We know the music can translate as a four-piece pretty well, and the icing on the cake is a good keyboard player.” Due to the malleable nature of the band, they have been able to play traditional venues such as Aquarius, The Holding Company, Beaumont’s alongside the Del Mar Plaza, birthday parties, weddings, funerals, brises, and bar mitzvahs.

If you’re up in North County, you can usually catch the Sweet Juanita duo about once a month at Le Papagayo in Leucadia. They played a marathon six-hour set there this past New Year’s Eve. The venue is also notable for being the spot where Bennett and Anderson began showcasing Anya True, the 17-year-old local who made it onto this season of The Voice. Anderson and Bennett would let True play a full set before they performed. Eventually Bennett told the manager there, “Why don’t you just book Anya as long as she wants, and we’ll play after? She’ll bring people.”

Speaking of True’s run on The Voice: “I hope she wins…and takes us on the road,” Bennett says jokingly. “I’ll put up the backline for everybody. I’ll be stage crew.”

Anderson adds “I’ll drive the bus.”

Bennett gets the final zinger: “He’s the Ken Kesey.”